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Artist’s Profile

Susan Moir Mackay is a professional artist with a B.A. Honours degree in Art and Design from Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. She is an impassioned advocate of art and has a deep abiding belief that art benefits individuals and communities. Susan has travelled extensively and has invested much of her time to art education projects and facilitating art, as well as developing her own art works and exhibitions.

Professional Education

1989Foundation Course, Cumbria College of Art, Carlisle

1992B.A. (Hons) Art and Design, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland

Artist Statement

Delving into our humanity is a common theme in my work.Shifting from broader society to intensely personal, exposing raw emotion or exposing my physical being through nudity, blood, hair, or sharing secrets and expressing our commonalities, I aim to find veiled truths. Society surprises me, those points of obvious yet unacknowledged contradictions interest me, I like to play with those contradictions in my art.

Being a woman informs the work; however my stand point is as a human who is experiencing reality in a female body, who is also a mother, sexual and a plethora of other labels.

Stitching is a powerful metaphor for how things are joined together or connected and I enjoy using this motif and referencing the heritage of womanly arts.

Using objects that have been donated, found or are a part of me, bring stories and connotations, collective and personal.They are our contemporary common language. It feels good to enshrine these mundane parts of life.

The works contradict themselves, sometimes pieces appear to be a tangle of unstructured chaos, other times using the precision of a scientist our messy humanity is formally documented. Yet underlying the mess, order, pain, humour, dysfunction, and discomfort; the rich layering and potential multifarious interpretations, there is a sense of honouring what is; the works are a deeper offering of the beauty of all aspects of human life.